Thomas Bancroft (c. 1596 – 1658) was a minor seventeenth-century English poet, He wrote a number of poems and epigrams addressed to notable people into which he embedded clever puns.
[4] Bancroft's first publication was The Glvtton's Feaver (1633), a narrative poem in seven-line stanzas of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
Several examples show his propensity to punning: In 1649 Bancroft contributed to Alexander Brome's Lachrymce Musarum, or the Teares of the Muses, a poem To the never-dying memory of the noble Lord Hastings.
Finally he published, in 1658, The Heroical Lover, or Antheon and Fidelta, and the collection of verse Times out of Tune, Plaid upon However in XX Satyres.
This last is a series of moralizing satirical poems directed against (inter alia) whoring, gluttony, alcoholism, hedonism, lying, pride in clothing, false friends, ambition, cowardice, cruelty, and the abuse of poetry.